If your favourite literary heroine had a mobile phone in her hand, stop for a moment and imagine what on earth she might text. Perhaps she'd be blunt and business-like, or she might be a complete drama queen.
Author Mallory Ortberg has written a book filled with text conversations, Texts From Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations With Your Favourite Literary Characters. It's the imagined SMS converations of classic and modern literary figures, from Jane Eyre to Scarlett O'Hara.
The idea came when Ortberg read a comment about a blog post on Gone with the Wind, that life in a small Southern town was still pretty much the same as in Mitchell's book, 'only now we all have cell phones.'
"The idea of Scarlett O'Hara—who is so selfish and sneaky and prone to lying and manipulation—with a cell phone was so vivid to me I came up with the idea on the spot," Ortberg said.
And if Ortberg could personally text a favourite literary character?
"I think maybe Phileas Fogg or Captain Nemo—I'm such a Verne fan and all of his protagonists were such absurdly rigid, humorless, larger-than-life dudes that I think I'd have a lot of fun with it."
